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Fraught negotiations between Austria’s political parties to form a new government began on Monday after a historic victory by the far right shattered the country’s political consensus.
With a hardline anti-immigration and pro-Russian platform, the Freedom party (FPÖ) won the highest share of the vote for the first time in Austria’s postwar period, with 29.2 per cent of the electorate casting their ballots in its favour.
The results were a disaster for the political centre. The moderate conservative People’s party (ÖVP) that has dominated the past 70 years of Austrian politics and currently governs with the Greens, fell to just 26.5 per cent — losing nearly a third of its seats in its biggest electoral loss. The Greens dropped to just 8.3 per cent.
The opposition Social Democrats (SPÖ) won just 21 per cent of the vote — their worst result ever.
“No party alone has leapt over the 50 per cent line, so now it is about talking to each other, negotiating, and finding good solutions and compromises,” said Austrian President Alexander Van der Bellen on Sunday evening.
Van der Bellen will exercise a crucial role in the coming days. While his office has no executive power, he has discretion over the appointment of ministers. A former leader of the Greens, Van der Bellen has been careful in his seven years in office to remain apolitical. But he has not hid his distaste for the FPÖ’s current leader, Herbert Kickl, who is demanding to be appointed chancellor given his party came first.
“To the best of my knowledge and conscience, I will ensure that the basic pillars of our democracy are respected when forming a government,” said Van der Bellen, citing “the rule of law, the separation of powers, human rights and the rights of minorities, the independence of the media and membership of the EU”.
“Those are the foundations on which our prosperity and security are built.”
The FPÖ on Monday finalised members of its negotiating team and has already drafted a document laying out its demands for policies in government.
Kickl, who has pushed the party further to the right, has made no secret of his desire for the chancellorship. The FPÖ campaign dubbed him “Volkskanzler Kickl” — the People’s chancellor — a phrasing used by Adolf Hitler.
Foremost in Kickl’s mind in the negotiations, said strategists close to the party, will be the memory of the FPÖ’s participation as a junior partner in the 2017-19 government of Sebastian Kurz. Kickl was then interior minister, and developed a deep mistrust for the ÖVP when the government collapsed.
Although they share the most common political ground, personal relations between the two parties continue to be poor.
The ÖVP’s current leader, Chancellor Karl Nehammer, has repeatedly ruled out participating in any government that involves Kickl himself. He reiterated that on Sunday after the vote.
The result has cemented Kickl’s rule, even as he still lacks a power base among the FPÖs traditional elites, typically members of elite nationalist student fraternities, which trace their history back to the Habsburg empire.
“Jörg Haider would be proud of us,” Kickl told an ecstatic audience of supporters in Vienna, referring to the FPÖ’s late flamboyant leader, whose best result in 1999 was eclipsed on Sunday. Kickl was Haider’s speechwriter.
ÖVP leaders consoled themselves on Sunday evening with what they regarded as a better than expected result for the party, meaning they were almost certain to re-enter government.
They will have to make some tough decisions, however. The ÖVP is particularly wary of the political consequences of partnering with the SPÖ, and the liberal Neos — the only mainstream party that increased its share of the vote, scoring 9.2 per cent. A so-called “candy coalition” between the three may only strengthen the FPÖ’s hand in the medium term, party strategists fear.
Throughout his campaign, Kickl disparagingly referred to other Austrian politicians as members of the “Einheitspartei”, the Unity party, implying that the establishment sticks together against the FPÖ and the voice of its disenfranchised supporters.
“Kickl has a strategy which is reaching beyond this election,” said political consultant Thomas Hofer.
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